errantmind

I've used GrapheneOS for a while now and have been impressed by it. I'd recommend it to all those who value privacy and security. Battery life is way better now as well.

1. No, because influence and decision making aren't evenly distributed between online/offline personas. Even if they were, it doesn't change human nature, (most) people need a sense of belonging, a group identity. If anything, virtue signalling appears to be amplified online for likes / follows / etc.

2. Centralized religion may be in decline across much of the world, but that doesn't mean all the ingrained beliefs and associated behaviors are linearly declining along with it. What I see are people adopting new systems of beliefs that replace their religious foundations while keeping many of the associated behaviors intact.

For example, a core aspect of most of the practices of Abrahamic religions is sin followed by guilt, shame, forgiveness and, sometimes, atonement. This process doesn't just disappear, it has inertia that often survives apostasy. I pointed out this process is open to ideological 'hijacking' and replacement by new ideologies which keep the process in place but alter the individual's conscious rationalization for that process's existence.

A lot of the newly popular ideologies start to make sense when you consider:

1. Peer pressure / virtue signalling / peacockery

2. Replacement guilt/shame hitching a ride on the decline of Christian values

3. Disassociation from reality, either due to physical distance (money) or mental distance (tech enabled social bubble)

Alright, thanks for the clarification. It looks like they opened it up for particular apps in the last few years but haven't yet gone beyond that.

They could have supported it until SMS was dead and buried. Also, RCS looks to have an upcoming third-party API, so it was absolutely a choice.

Sadly, this was released in the shadow of them removing SMS integration. From my perspective they have really mixed up their priorities.

Are there any examples of large public companies that have reversed course on ads and purged them from their products?

It seems once they are in place, they infest and eventually permeate to all levels of the product, like cockroaches.

I suspect it is just impossible for executives to argue against something tangible (ad-revenue) in favor of something intangible (ad-free experience).

Yes, but based on the available information in the Github issue(s), I don't think it is going to change, although I'd be happy if it did.

I believe Zig and Go's adoption is essentially capped with the compiler being this pedantic, as it overly bisects potential adopters. It is too polarizing. Some people love it, some people dislike it, but for the people who dislike it, it is enough to write off the entire language.

Agreed, but I don't see Zig ever fulfilling that niche either as the compiler is too opinionated (like Go) in ways that are off-putting to a significant subset of developers, myself included.

Linking is often the slow part for large projects. Switching to the Mold linker can help some, but it can still be relatively slow on a lot of hardware.

Overall I agree with you though, it isn't slow enough on my hardware to interrupt my dev-flow.

How does this compare to Real-ESRGAN?

I didn't frame it anything like that. Ironically, this is what the post is about: uncharitable cynicism.

Me saying it is easier to criticise than create doesn't mean criticism is always harmful or useless.

Not always. 90% of criticism is crap too, and that is what I'm referring to.

It is easier to criticise than actually do anything constructive.

* An open and well documented developer API

* Removal of phone number requirements. Replace with a lot of added captchas for suspected abusers.

* More emphasis on hashtags. Discovery features built around hashtags

* E2E Encrypted DMs

* Free speech, but augmented by better filtering options so people can better filter out the stuff they aren't interested in

Definitely interesting as a puzzle, but personally I'd prefer a write-up on each of these novel algorithms, including what it is and how it works, with complete code.

To each their own.

At this point it seems a lot more likely you are projecting your own irrationality and helplessness onto others. Reasoning from correlation alone isn't going to get you very far.

Many people being gullible and herd-oriented doesn't equate to them being forced to consume products.

I'm not forced to eat shit. Neither are you. If you disagree please reference the shit I'm being forced to eat, or products I'm being forced to buy. I'll then point out whether or not your statements have any standing.

Advertisers force us to do nothing at all. Memes similarly force nothing. This is a bastardization of the word 'force'.

Either people have rights or they don't. We don't need the government to pick and choose how individuals express themselves in order to protect others, not because it doesn't make sense, but because there is no way to do it without a Ministry of Truth, which is arguably even worse.

Remember, freedom of speech is freedom from governmental oppression first and foremost, the kind that arises when authoritarians get to tell people what and how to think.

It is actively harmful to divert discussion away from all of the information in the well-sourced original publication, regardless of the truth of your statement.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is interesting in that it rejects most classical and modern Western philosophy. To find anything that speaks to it in the West, you have to read pre-Plato fragments (Heraclitus), or Nietzsche, or the fringes of Process Philosophy.

Even then, you probably won't be any closer to understanding quality but you'll at least be more confident in its existence and be able to vaguely conceptualize it.

For me, the starting point is a deep appreciation for the ancient Greek state of mind called Arete (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arete). I say 'state of mind' because it was only transformed into a 'concrete concept' later. The Wikipedia article doesn't do it justice as it has been Plato-ized but.. it is something.

Pre-Plato, it was a way of existing predicated on becoming or approaching excellence (as opposed to being a something). It isn't confined to a discipline or occupation and you never 'get there'. For Nietzsche, it enabled a key component of the Will to Power, self-overcoming.

While I broadly agree with your point, rewarding seniority is at odds with rewarding people based on how good they are at their jobs, from the perspective of incentives. The two are not always correlated and this is often why some companies hire externally instead of promoting from within.

That said, companies are often wrong to hire externally as they misattribute their problems to their employees instead of to their own leadership. It is easier for them to blame others instead of themselves.

I flag all articles that do this and I hope others do the same so we don't waste our time.

I'd say risk aversion and boredom aversion go hand-in-hand. Why even consider taking a risk for an unknown amount of baseline satisfaction? It is a lot easier to dopamine surf social media with proven returns on time, even if those returns are meager in comparison to longer-form activities

Simply: most everything got overrun with ads. Also, IP law is stifling innovation.

The more time people spend passively consuming entertainment, the less time they spend doing everything else, including socializing.

Most everyone I know just sits on their phones, computers, or TVs a good portion of the day. All boredom is banished, all gaps are filled. The threshold for participation and collaboration is higher, because why risk boredom when you have guaranteed-minimum-satisfaction available.

This take lacks nuance, better to ask why software estimation is hard. To name a few reasons:

1. Business pressures to 'accelerate' timelines without understanding the tradeoffs

2. Frequent developer turnover / ramp-up time

3. Developer + engineering manager level of competence, mostly due to people going where the money is and it being difficult to assess skill level

4. 4-year degrees teaching very few applicable real-world skills and bootcamps teaching even less

Why was the title changed from the original?

> unless we are using a definition of "relevant" ..

Yea, this is the crux. Using a particular tag in your post is a prediction that people who appreciate the content clustered around that tag will like your post. A good portion of the time that is based on accuracy, but sometimes it isn't, as I already explained (especially in the most used tags). Instagram was never set up to have the specificity of a search engine.

I agree tags are less useful now, because the feedback loop is broken after Facebook's changes, but it wasn't always like this. Every point I've made is about a particular period in time, not the present.

We agree on the intended use of the app being more about passive consumption of a feed of interesting content, not active, thorough exploration of particular topics.

I'm not sure why you think the whole hashtag system was trash because of this one aspect. Most of the evidence I see is contrary to your statements.

To reiterate, the strength of the tagging system is the relationship between the tags you interact with, not any given individual tag. Also, individual tags are not exclusively literal descriptors for their content. They may be, or they may be used like: 'people who like #jenniferlawrence will also like #...'